October 2011
Intermediate to advanced
300 pages
5h 51m
English
Is your Puppet sleeping on the job? By default, when you run the Puppet agent on a client, it will become a daemon (background process), waking up every 30 minutes to check for any manifest updates and apply them (optionally after a randomized delay using the splay setting in puppet.conf). If you want more control over when Puppet runs, you can trigger it using cron instead.
For example, if you have many Puppet clients, you may want to deliberately stagger the Puppet run times to spread the load on the Puppetmaster. A simple way to do this is to set the minute or hour of the cron job time using a hash of the client hostname.
Use Puppet's inline_template function, which allows you to execute Ruby code:
cron ...
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